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There is something much more important than plain design: functionality. Sometimes Apple forgets that For instance, back ports on Mac instead of much useful frontal ones, lack of disk and CPU activity lights on Mac, misleading black screen while shutting down Mac not yet turned off (imagine catastrophic effects when unplugging external booting disk in a hurry), lack of matte display as previously available, lack of power button on keyboard as was previously possible, etc.

What was the function of thinning the iMac?Apple have had some shocking design ideas recently.I hope things turn around soon, if not for us but also for the companies that rely on copying all of Apple's designs.

What was the function of thinning the iMac?Apple have had some shocking design ideas recently.I hope things turn around soon, if not for us but also for the companies that rely on copying all of Apple's designs.

The iMac includes only one fan, while even the new 13" MBP with Touch Bar includes two. So the reason of iMac's thinness becomes obvious: to cope with the heat. It also partly uses mobile components, for the same reason. A bulky machine would retain much more heat and would amplify fan noise much more. Thanks to its thinness, we don't even notice that there is a fan inside. Much more comfortable...

Its pretty obvious by recent designs that Ive is bored, fat, lazy, and not motivated.

We need new leadership that is exicted, hungry, and willing to take risks.

Few examples of design that is below the Apple standard:

1. Same iPhone shell for 3 years. Unacceptable. Even cheap POS China companies come out with yearly shell changes.

Yes he certainly seems over rated. Makes me appreciate how good Jobs was for design when I look at something MEH like the 6, 6S, and 7 designs. Not nearly as good as iPhone 4 thru iPhone 5S.

And they are certainly killing their computer line. TouchBar is way overrated.

I personally cannot digest iPhone 6-7 series designs, but I believe the blame is not on the design department nor on Ive. People have got what they deserve. People wanted a large screen phone, and this is how a large screen phone could be made without compromising usability. This is also why all large screen phones look similar. Because the form factor limit has already been reached and there is not much room for a designer to play with.

I am against large screen phones and iPhone 5/5s/SE is also my design favorite. I believe so little large screen does not contribute to anything, and I favor the iPad over them.

Incidentally, what is the point of leaving the headline as originally written when the author of this piece was called out and taken to task on Twitter earlier by Jason Snell (the so-called "pundit" in the story here) for misrepresenting his quotes?

What was the function of thinning the iMac?Apple have had some shocking design ideas recently.I hope things turn around soon, if not for us but also for the companies that rely on copying all of Apple's designs.

The iMac includes only one fan, while even the new 13" MBP with Touch Bar includes two. So the reason of iMac's thinness becomes obvious: to cope with the heat. It also partly uses mobile components, for the same reason. A bulky machine would retain much more heat and would amplify fan noise much more. Thanks to its thinness, we don't even notice that there is a fan inside. Much more comfortable...

That understanding of thermodynamics is arse over tit. The thinness adds to the internal heat, hence the fans and hence the mobile components. Think about a heat source heating a big room vs a small room and you might just get it.

What was the function of thinning the iMac?Apple have had some shocking design ideas recently.I hope things turn around soon, if not for us but also for the companies that rely on copying all of Apple's designs.

The iMac includes only one fan, while even the new 13" MBP with Touch Bar includes two. So the reason of iMac's thinness becomes obvious: to cope with the heat. It also partly uses mobile components, for the same reason. A bulky machine would retain much more heat and would amplify fan noise much more. Thanks to its thinness, we don't even notice that there is a fan inside. Much more comfortable...

That understanding of thermodynamics is arse over tit. The thinness adds to the internal heat, hence the fans and hence the mobile components. Think about a heat source heating a big room vs a small room and you might just get it.

Ha ha... When talking about thermodynamics you seem unaware of the universe's eternal cold death. Everything cools down. But a small room cools down much faster ;-)

What was the function of thinning the iMac?Apple have had some shocking design ideas recently.I hope things turn around soon, if not for us but also for the companies that rely on copying all of Apple's designs.

The iMac includes only one fan, while even the new 13" MBP with Touch Bar includes two. So the reason of iMac's thinness becomes obvious: to cope with the heat. It also partly uses mobile components, for the same reason. A bulky machine would retain much more heat and would amplify fan noise much more. Thanks to its thinness, we don't even notice that there is a fan inside. Much more comfortable...

That understanding of thermodynamics is arse over tit. The thinness adds to the internal heat, hence the fans and hence the mobile components. Think about a heat source heating a big room vs a small room and you might just get it.

Ha ha... When talking about thermodynamics you seem unaware of the universe's eternal cold death. Everything cools down. But a small room cools down much faster ;-)

Wtf has that got to do with a computer with a continuous heat source? The universe has a few trillion years left.

What was the function of thinning the iMac?Apple have had some shocking design ideas recently.I hope things turn around soon, if not for us but also for the companies that rely on copying all of Apple's designs.

The iMac includes only one fan, while even the new 13" MBP with Touch Bar includes two. So the reason of iMac's thinness becomes obvious: to cope with the heat. It also partly uses mobile components, for the same reason. A bulky machine would retain much more heat and would amplify fan noise much more. Thanks to its thinness, we don't even notice that there is a fan inside. Much more comfortable...

That understanding of thermodynamics is arse over tit. The thinness adds to the internal heat, hence the fans and hence the mobile components. Think about a heat source heating a big room vs a small room and you might just get it.

Ha ha... When talking about thermodynamics you seem unaware of the universe's eternal cold death. Everything cools down. But a small room cools down much faster ;-)

Wtf has that got to do with a computer with a continuous heat source? The universe has a few trillion years left.

A thinner Mac will heat up faster.

I don't understand what comment you're taking umbrage with as you're restating what he has said about volume and heat dissipation.

What was the function of thinning the iMac?Apple have had some shocking design ideas recently.I hope things turn around soon, if not for us but also for the companies that rely on copying all of Apple's designs.

The iMac includes only one fan, while even the new 13" MBP with Touch Bar includes two. So the reason of iMac's thinness becomes obvious: to cope with the heat. It also partly uses mobile components, for the same reason. A bulky machine would retain much more heat and would amplify fan noise much more. Thanks to its thinness, we don't even notice that there is a fan inside. Much more comfortable...

That understanding of thermodynamics is arse over tit. The thinness adds to the internal heat, hence the fans and hence the mobile components. Think about a heat source heating a big room vs a small room and you might just get it.

Ha ha... When talking about thermodynamics you seem unaware of the universe's eternal cold death. Everything cools down. But a small room cools down much faster ;-)

Wtf has that got to do with a computer with a continuous heat source? The universe has a few trillion years left.

A thinner Mac will heat up faster.

It may. But a bulky Mac too will heat up faster. Since the heat source is continuously active, the mass of the material does not matter much in heating time. Both a bulky computer and a thin computer would heat up in a relatively short time, almost instantly. But a bulky computer would retain its heat much longer. In a thin computer, the continuous heating can be leveraged by continuous fan plus natural heat dissipation. It is not so easy in a bulky computer due to the amount of heat it can retain.

Please enlighten me to which design choices I fail to understand. Changing iMac hard drives by removing the screen assembly?

Yes, plenty of things were 'fixed' then 'unfixed'. Front ports for example. The entire Mac Pro for example. But anyway, at least you tacitly admit they got things wrong but they were great enough change or fix what they got wrong.

And where did I say Apple was at it best before Flower Power?

Is my argument that Apple isn't perfect in EVERYTHING it has ever done?

Your point is exactly? That you don't like people criticising Apple and giving examples?

What do you think this means?:

"Lots of great design but lots of trash design too"

Yes, not having an easily accessible panel on the iMac to change the hard drive is a design choice you fail to understand. I expect that fewer than 10% of iMacs ever have their hard drives changed. Therefore it makes perfect sense to not prioritize hard drive accessibility. Likewise, you obviously don't get that Apple eschewed microSD in iPhones (etc) intentionally because having an OS without a visible file system was part of the genius of the original iPhone. And yes having the fingerprint sensor on the front of the phone is a great place to put it. There are plenty of things that Apple has done that can be considered design "mistakes" in retrospect (because no one's perfect); but most of your examples are the opposite of mistakes.

You said "That is a nice summary of recent disasters. I agree that design at Apple is past it's best." and then immediately described a bunch of bad designs from a long time ago including the Cube and the silly dalmation and flower power iMacs. That suggests that you believe that "Apple's best" predated those designs. If that wasn't your point, when was the Apple design heyday?

Frankly I don't know what point you were trying to make over all. The post was a disorganized bullet list of random things you didn't like. If your thesis was the "Apple design is past its best" you didn't provide coherent evidence to back that up since many of the things you listed were from 5, 10, or 15 years ago.

My point is that vomiting up a disorganized list of unrelated things, many of which have nothing to do with design) isn't very persuasive.

Windows and Android are perfectly functional operating systems and according to most of you guys Microsoft is "killing it" with the Surface Studio and how well they are serving creatives.

Also according to you guys Tim Cook is incompetent and Ive is overrated and both should be fired. That's not happening any decade soon. So wtf? Why are you guys still here? It's just gear. Gear is meant to be replaced with more functional gear that better suits your needs. And yet we have post after repetitive post whining about the same things as if Apple suddenly changed how they designed and built things. It's been this way since the first Macintosh.

There is something much more important than plain design: functionality. Sometimes Apple forgets that For instance, back ports on Mac instead of much useful frontal ones, lack of disk and CPU activity lights on Mac, misleading black screen while shutting down Mac not yet turned off (imagine catastrophic effects when unplugging external booting disk in a hurry), lack of matte display as previously available, lack of power button on keyboard as was previously possible, etc.

So little of this makes sense… It's just a list of contrived edge cases and guff that no one needs.

Apple is moving to SSDs across the board, so what exactly is your hard disk light showing you? Come to think of it, what did it ever show you? That something is being written to disk? I just hit the save button so I kinda knew that.

And I'm supposed to believe that someone who is savvy enough to boot his Mac from an external drive is also stupid enough to rip the cable from the drive without checking that the machine isn't properly powered down first?

Lack of a power button on a keyboard? Seriously? What's the point? So few people actually turn their machines off these days.

I think people are really starting to scrape the bottom of the whine barrel.

What was the function of thinning the iMac?Apple have had some shocking design ideas recently.I hope things turn around soon, if not for us but also for the companies that rely on copying all of Apple's designs.

That's actually a very good question: what is the function of thinning the iMac?

For one thing, this isn't just Apple: everyone is doing it.

I was was in a pub a few years back, and I got chatting to a chap who'd left IT to become a furniture maker. I thought he was doing bespoke crafty stuff, but he said, "No not really. I just do really plain tables and living room stuff that's just a third smaller than regular furniture."

"What?"

Turns out he specialised in show home furnishing. New houses are now so small that this chap is making serious coin by producing miniature furniture to make the houses look bigger.

Next time you go to an IKEA, have a look at their living room and bedroom displays. They use dummy PCs modelled after the iMac because people don't have room for a dedicated desk for a computer. These days they go on a sideboard that's almost flush to the wall with a pull-draw for the mouse and keyboard.

So, what is the function of thinning the Mac? It's thin so it fits nicely inside the tiny boxes folk are living in these days – assuming they can afford a box at all.

What was the function of thinning the iMac?Apple have had some shocking design ideas recently.I hope things turn around soon, if not for us but also for the companies that rely on copying all of Apple's designs.

That's actually a very good question: what is the function of thinning the iMac?

For one thing, this isn't just Apple: everyone is doing it.

I was was in a pub a few years back, and I got chatting to a chap who'd left IT to become a furniture maker. I thought he was doing bespoke crafty stuff, but he said, "No not really. I just do really plain tables and living room stuff that's just a third smaller than regular furniture."

"What?"

Turns out he specialised in show home furnishing. New houses are now so small that this chap is making serious coin by producing miniature furniture to make the houses look bigger.

Next time you go to an IKEA, have a look at their living room and bedroom displays. They use dummy PCs modelled after the iMac because people don't have room for a dedicated desk for a computer. These days they go on a sideboard that's almost flush to the wall with a pull-draw for the mouse and keyboard.

So, what is the function of thinning the Mac? It's thin so it fits nicely inside the tiny boxes folk are living in these days – assuming they can afford a box at all.

But that was a very good question.

All those fancy team spaces you see in google, Facebook, Dropbox,..., every over accountant office. The space for those comes directly from the desk space no longer needed for bulky crt monitors and lots of paper.

Since modern reportage features among other things amnesia of anything that happened before, let me just note that there've been rumors of Ive leaving for a couple of years now. Not that I know anything, my guess is that he'll leave eventually, but there's no reason to think the time is now. Indeed, Gruber makes it pretty clear. And speaking of Gruber, as he alludes in his piece (but doesn't make clear), he is not a particularly articulate speaker, and that inability is what started this whole idiocy. (Confession: I'm no better, so it's not a criticism, just a fact, noted. As he implied -- and the reason for the post -- is that he writes clearer than he speaks.)